


The Aberration

by speckledsolanaceae



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Aliens, Alternate Universe - Creatures & Monsters, Alternate Universe - Future, Artificial Intelligence, M/M, Outer Space, Sci-Fi Fantasy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-10
Updated: 2020-01-10
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:29:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22201087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speckledsolanaceae/pseuds/speckledsolanaceae
Summary: History has made many mistakes, but Yuta is not one of them.
Relationships: Kim Dongyoung | Doyoung/Nakamoto Yuta
Comments: 24
Kudos: 109
Collections: NCT Spookfest 2020





	The Aberration

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rainingover](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainingover/gifts).



> Happy SO belated birthday to miss rainingover ♡ ;; I'm so sorry for taking so long, but I hope you love this. I do!
> 
> To everyone else, please enjoy my first attempt at sci-fi, which mostly diverged straight into vaguely space-fantasy. A writer cursed in their ways.

Practice rules were stricter on stations. The equilibrium was fragile, or so they said. There were rules etched into the metal beams at every turn at Station Fi-De. “Conflict leads to violence,” “prehensiles remain tucked while roaming,” “foreign objects must be cleared,” “exercise tolerance.” It was a desperate attempt to maintain peace among upward two-thousand foreign bodies, so it wasn’t uncommon to be thrown into the Ridged Room for so much as squinting too hard at a window.

“That’s a little bit exaggerated, don’t you think?”

“Stop that. This is your fault.”

Yuta stuck his tongue out and shifted against the uncomfortable floor and walls, the raised bands digging into his spine.

Less than an hour earlier, Yuta had lashed out (all the way across the room in a prickly wave of compression the color of clean turquoise) at their classmate who had called Dongyoung a “slimeskin.”

Dongyoung had already flung himself out of his chair to get at this person’s throat (if he could manage), but then they were keeling over their desk and vomiting straight onto the tile before he’d so much as grabbed their shirt.

The master obviously sent them both away.

“What I don’t understand,” Yuta said, attempting to compose his body in a way that resembled lounging (it was hard; this room was a literal pain in the ass), “is why she didn’t send them out, too. I wouldn’t mind rearranging their insides again.”

“That first hit was a little much for one slur,” Dongyoung sighed, already resigned to the strips of bruises he’d be garnering. The Ridged Room was just a lot of white, windowless hallway that looked like a boxy, collapsed plastic straw. It was meant to be uncomfortable, not torturous. It was a detention for being disruptive and violent and little else.

Either way, it was offensive to Dongyoung’s delicate bones.

Yuta snorted. “You’re not delicate.”

Dongyoung slapped Yuta’s clothed thigh, which obviously brought out the theatrics.

“Oh, I’m dying. I see dead people. The Silin boy’s gone and infected me. I’m—”

“Shut it.”

Yuta started to laugh, then dragged himself to his feet to escape the ridges abusing his back and ass. It was probably easier against the soles of his shoes, though the thin air in this room in particular meant he’d be sitting down again soon.

Dongyoung’s throat clicked inconspicuously, but he knew how to force his brain blank, then carefully fling up his mental nets. Almost immediately, Yuta cast him a glance and raised a clever eyebrow.

“You’ve been scrubbing my brain for long enough, thank you,” Dongyoung said, staring right back.

“Fair,” Yuta said, looking away and scuffing his shoes against the finer grooves between the larger bands. If Dongyoung knew him as well as he thought, this was truly a display of acceptance. Yuta only looked immediately and significantly more bored by his circumstances.

The room truly was the most boring, but it was a lot better having Yuta in there with him.

The older boy was all blue tones if the lighting was indirect, then cerulean and silver if the central star hit him just right. In the Ridged Room, under the artificial mimicry, he was the latter, blue-black hair slipping in waves over his shoulders and down his back. Spects were sensitive to their skin and hair being touched, so Dongyoung had never dared to even breathe on him too closely, but he’d always wanted to feel for himself if Spect hair really felt like water. Or if Yuta would be like summer under his fingertips if he touched his skin.

“You’re staring,” Yuta said, and his voice was just loud enough to bounce against the zig-zagged walls. “Are you thinking about me or just zoning out?”

Dongyoung snorted. “What’s there to think about with you?”

“I think I’m pretty interesting,” Yuta defended, and stretched up to crack his spine. Dongyoung elected to ignore the slip of pale silver at his waist.

“You’re okay,” Dongyoung said.

“I defended you!” Yuta said, relaxing into indignance that was absolutely an act.

“I didn’t ask,” Dongyoung rebutted. “That class is going to smell like sick for days, now.”

Yuta rolled his eyes, then started cracking his knuckles and wrists like a tiny cascading ritual. “Fucking racists.”

Dongyoung exhaled a single laugh through his nose and closed his eyes against the white light.

* * *

They met under similar circumstances, but for slightly different reasons. Fi-De was a cultured breeding ground for high-humidity medicinal flowers. The flower of specialty was a silver flame orchid variant, where the males sent out wet pollen like hovering mist and the females sucked in the essence and drooled out the water and seeds like snot.

The environments that the orchid grew in was controlled and tempered, but residents and students would be periodically signed, trained, and sent to do certain tasks—harvesting, refining, burning, whatever.

Dongyoung was soaked and dripping, and being a Silin, he was one of the few people forced to wear a hazmat even though this was  _ his _ home. There had been exactly one study that had suggested Silin fluids were a direct deterrent to controlled development of most plantlife (that is, his sweat was  _ freedom  _ water, damnit), and suddenly he was a hazard. On his own mother planet.

He could hardly see through the transparency of his suit he was steaming so badly, and the orchid grounds sloshed like reactive bogwater if he so much as twitched. The reservoir was a massive glass structure that stretched on for just over a mile, trapping in the climate and allowing it to be controlled to perfection. There were bugs and various helpful critters about, but nothing that wasn’t at absolutely the lowest point of the food chain for fear the orchids would be ruined. Through the glass ceiling, the central star glowed through the skies and lit up the orchids in their sparkling greys.

His childhood was drenched with these flowers sighing over the planet in swathes, smelling of petrichor and enriched minerals. If he had smelled his peers’ stench properly after this kind of service, the reservoirs smelled more like decay, now.

But the agencies swore they knew what they were doing, and the medical progress had supported that assertion. Dongyoung was only an ignorant aboriginal unaware of his planet’s riches.

Apparently.

It wasn’t easy to navigate the reservoir in a hazmat suit, and it was even harder to collect the excess orchid pods wallowing in the waterlogged mud. His fingers were bulky in the gloves, and the pods were slippery (much like himself if he wanted to be).

He had about five in his palm ready to be put in the pouch at his waist before he was slammed into from behind. The pods tumbled like glistening marbles and plunked into the mud just as he flung his hands out and crushed an entire orchid and bud.

“Damn. For being Silin, you really don’t give a fuck about hurting your planet, do you?” drawled a voice, and maybe the hazmat suit was really to protect fools from getting Dongyoung’s nails right up into their arteries and sending them straight to hell. They wouldn’t be able to sleep for weeks with  _ him _ pumping through their insipid blood.

Dongyoung heaved anger out of his lungs while on his hands and knees, the blood of the orchid seeping in ashy grey through the black mud. He didn’t understand the changes Fi-De were making to the plants of his home. Once upon a time, their dying fluids were white.

He pushed himself to just his knees before he was shoved again right between his shoulder blades. It felt sharp, like someone had thrust their knee there, and the thing was he didn’t even recognize the voice, and his periphery was blocked off by the suit, and he was so immediately mad he wouldn’t be able to see through the blur of his tears  _ anyway. _

“You’re one clumsy fuck. No wonder we had to take o—”

“See, it looked to me like you pushed him. Twice.”

The voice came from up ahead, so Dongyoung could look up to see and identify the one stepping over the nearest row of orchids with care. It wasn’t hard to identify Spects—they were all kind of unnatural-looking at first glance with the way they shimmered and seemed to move in glitching flashes. He knew from experience that if he watched one long enough, their movements turned seamless and smooth like they weren’t a freak of nature at all.

“Sorry,” drawled the voice, “I didn’t realize you were involved. Can’t keep yourself out of other people’s business, Spect? Don’t you impose enough?”

“My name’s Yuta, thanks, and I’d say you’re the one imposing on someone else’s business. Was he hurting you?” In another voice, maybe Yuta would sound mellow enough to be confusing, but here in the cloud of pollen and fog, he sounded acerbic enough to burn. He stopped approaching, but was close enough to Dongyoung’s sunken hands for him to see his boots flicker.

“Who the fuck allowed you to get a name?” the voice said with disgust. “You’re barely humanoid.”

Dongyoung couldn’t look high enough to see what happened next, but there was the sound of a sickening crack and then a whole section of the reservoir uprooting itself as the person behind Dongyoung slid and splattered in the filth.

“Your anthropocentrism is obnoxious,” said Yuta as the voice yowled like a feral cat. “This is his planet before it’s yours. Grow up.”

There was the sludgy sound of this person grappling themselves to their feet, clumsy and panting and uprooting orchids in handfuls of mire. They were already yelling for the station masters, and as Dongyoung pushed himself to his feet, he heard Yuta hum in an errant thought.

“Sorry. I think I got us in trouble.”

It was the first time Dongyoung properly saw Yuta’s face. Most people argued that Spects could never be beautiful—how could one look into their aberrational eyes and decide them to be normal enough to love? Yuta’s eyes were deep and dark, shifting and glitching to more properly settle into what Dongyoung could understand.

There was warmth there, so how much of a mistake could Spects possibly be?

* * *

It was just them in the sorting unit, Dongyoung at a table with thick gloves on and Yuta sitting cross-legged on the ground with a bucket in his lap.

As punishment, their job was to sit there and differentiate between the pods their entire group had collected by the end of their work. The sprouted pods went in one container, the rooted-only pods in another, the ready-to-root pods in another, and so on. It was peaceful, in all honesty—Dongyoung didn’t mind routine tasks, and he was out of his suit, so his skin could finally breathe. 

Yuta was working in complete silence, and Dongyoung had watched him for long enough that his movements looked perfect. Aside from his blue undertones in the low lighting, he looked almost perfectly human.

It was only when Yuta looked up that Dongyoung realized he’d been staring.

Yuta didn’t confront him about this. He only looked back at him from the ground and smiled, head tilting ever so slightly.

“Can you read my mind?” Dongyoung said, and fully expected Yuta to stop smiling and maybe rearrange his viscera. 

Yuta didn’t do that. “If it was important to me.”

This was not the answer Dongyoung expected.

Yuta set the pod in his hand back in the bucket and leaned on the synthetic rim, gaze dark and steady. “We can’t just  _ do _ it. I’d have to either subdue you physically and force myself in or be granted your permission.”

“Oh,” Dongyoung said, feeling his brain fizzle in the way it did when all the things you’ve been told your whole life turned out to be false. “Is it tiring?”

“To physically subdue people?” Yuta asked, and it was obviously a joke with the way his mouth curled to show a slip of smile.

“To—” Dongyoung huffed, not quite annoyed but almost. “To read minds.”

Yuta shook his head, then broke eye contact to get back to sorting. “No,” he said, putting a sprouted pod delicately in his leftmost container. “It’s not.”

* * *

From that experience onward, Dongyoung felt like he saw Yuta everywhere. He’d probably always been there—they were in the same station district given that had a class or two they shared. There weren’t many people who would willingly interact with a Spect, so he was often alone.

Historically, the world had exploded existentially when AI were perfected—there’d been wars, movements, laws passed, restricted camps made. It exploded again when reproduction and the wiles of human, fallacious love was flung into the mix and Spects came into being. Glitchy, strange, semi-existent Spects who were some bastardized mix of human and the artificial. The AI were shunned, and the Spects were barely tolerated.

After his one qualm being corrected, though, Dongyoung didn’t mind the thought of being around Yuta. His first impression one-on-one was simply that Yuta was polite and surprisingly patient given the fact that he attacked a peer for being narrow-minded. Over time, he’d discover Yuta to enjoy teasing him, which was both annoying and extremely welcome on the planet he used to call home.

They traded questions the first few weeks over shared lunches and random, spur-of-the-moment walks. 

“If I touch you, will I start hallucinating?” Yuta asked, along the same vein of the question he asked previously (“If I grab you, will you slip out of my grip?” to which he replied honestly, “Maybe.” but he wouldn’t—he wouldn’t mind Yuta touching him). His questions had a tone of distant innocence, like he wouldn’t mind if Dongyoung refused to answer. That feeling, interestingly enough, made him want to answer even more.

“Depends. Right now you won’t,” Dongyoung said, and stopped to nudge a mossy rock in the middle of the path back to the edge. Dongyoung’s home planet was, apparently, exceptionally humid and green. To Dongyoung, it was entirely tolerable and comfortable so long as he wasn’t stuck in a hazmat suit creating his own sweat-cloud. 

“Depends on what?”

Dongyoung paused before answering, letting his hand skim across the leaves of the flora as they walked. “I’m happy right now.”

Yuta was silent, and when Dongyoung looked over to figure out why, his heart already hitching in his chest, he found Yuta gazing at him.

“When you’re happy, your secretions are normal?”

Dongyoung tried not to blush, but it happened anyway. “They’re soothing. To… to others.”

“Oh,” Yuta said quietly, and Dongyoung rushed to fill the space behind.

“Why are Spects sensitive to touch?”

Yuta’s eyes glimmered like he knew he’d accidentally embarrassed Dongyoung and was more than happy to humor him. “Deliberate touch forms a psychic connection. It’s very overwhelming if I don’t expect it.”

Dongyoung tried to wrap his mind around this. “But you said you have to ask permission first before you can read minds.”

Yuta’s mouth twisted. “I should have corrected you. I have to ask permission in order to read  _ thoughts. _ If you touch me right now, I’d be able to feel what you feel and get a general sense of some other things.” His fingers started to fiddle mid-answer, smoothing along the hem of his tank top.

Dongyoung found this both embarrassing and intimidating given his budding predicament, but he plowed onward instead, the tinge of starset and greenery fading into the background. “Like what?”

Yuta answered quickly, eyes flicking over his face. “Like how fast your heart’s beating,” he said, and then without pause, switched gears. “Do all of your secretions have the same effects?”

Dongyoung barely caught his breath, then barely understood the next question. “No. Do you look the same to everyone?”

Yuta looked overwhelmed. “No,” he said, and his step stuttered to a stop, eyes on him, looking just as breathless. Dongyoung stopped with him—there was no point to walking more without him. “No, this is what I look like to you. I—I look similar to other people but not the same.”

To Dongyoung, that sounded a lot like love. Where the longer you knew a person, the more real, the more beautiful they looked. Yuta, Dongyoung decided firmly, didn’t have to be normal enough to love.

“Do I look alright?” Yuta said, voice thin but so soft. “To you?”

They’d known each other for a handful of weeks at best, and yet Dongyoung was already staring off the edge of his very first cliff. “You look beautiful, Yuta,” he said, and continued walking before he’d combust on the spot and start sweating hallucinogens. 

* * *

Dongyoung let Yuta into his mind after two months. Yuta had never asked—never even implied he had plans to ask or would someday even consider it. He almost definitely didn’t know Dongyoung was irritated by this because, well, he couldn’t read his mind.

“When are you going to ask for permission?” Dongyoung asked the sky, staring at the clouds visible through the rich canopy of green and lavender. They were both lying on the ground in a copse, backs sinking into the soft moss making a bed in the middle of the preserved wilds south of Fi-De. The fauna was active and wild around them, though a number of smaller creatures had fumbled over them already. Next to taking a walk, this was probably one of the more relaxing things to do. He used to do it on his own before Yuta, but Yuta liked nature a lot and very much liked to come along.

The equilibrium they’d breathed into the peace was immediately disturbed as Yuta leaned up on one of his elbows and looked so intently at Dongyoung that he thought for a second that maybe he’d spoken a horrible taboo.

“Permission for what?” Yuta asked, voice firm, and Dongyoung was sufficiently intimidated by his dark eyes and intent.

“To read my mind,” Dongyoung said, though it was much more of an uncertain mutter at this point.

Yuta just stared at him as the critters scavenged and made noise around them.

He didn’t stop staring at him. Dongyoung blushed. “What?”

“You want me in there?” Yuta asked, and sounded so dumbfounded Dongyoung only blushed deeper.

“I mean,” Dongyoung said, increasingly unsure, “I thought I wouldn’t mind a second ago. Why? Will it fuck me up, or something?”

“No,” Yuta said, immediate and sounding so assured that Dongyoung’s caution was replaced pretty neatly with insult.

“Do you not want to hear my thoughts?” Dongyoung asked, and felt his eyes narrow almost involuntarily.

“No—” Yuta blurted. “I mean that’s not it. No, I just.” Yuta didn’t look like he was breathing anymore, which would explain the increasing tint of cerulean in the whites of his eyes and the weird flickering of his braided hair. He let it all out all at once, then got up on his knees. He looked almost sweaty, which was funny because Spects didn’t sweat all that often even on the planet Sil. “Are you sure?” he asked, still looking so intent and earnest Dongyoung felt like squirming out of his own amphibious skin.

“I think so? You’ve told me what it’s like, so—”

“Unless I go looking, I’ll only hear your surface thoughts,” Yuta promised, reassuring firmly as the light sunk through his silvery skin. “But I  _ could _ rummage around if I wanted to, Doyoung. You understand that, right?”

Dongyoung shrugged, slipping into stubbornness the longer Yuta was anxious. “You can’t mess with anything. You’re just looking.”

Yuta was still looking at him with the utmost disbelief, and Dongyoung was done with lying down under his gaze. He sat up, cross-legged and scrunched his face at Yuta. “Am I missing something?”

“I—no,” Yuta said, sounding insecure, of all things.

“You don’t have to,” Dongyoung said, trying not to keep holding onto that feeling of being slighted. “I’m just saying you should ask if you want.”

Yuta let out another heavy breath and lifted one hand from where it rested on his thigh, reaching for his knee. “Can I?”

Dongyoung resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “Yes.”

Yuta’s touch on his knee was gentle, and then all at once there was the most soft, careful feeling of having something so intangible but so bright slip through him. It was like a clean breeze, and Dongyoung closed his eyes for a moment to try to hold onto him. 

The next moment, he could hardly tell anything had happened at all and he opened his eyes to stare. Nothing felt different.

“Did you stop?”

“No,” Yuta said, and withdrew his hand. There was a tiny tremor in his fingers. “I’m there.”

“Oh.”

Yuta simply sat there, looking kind of distant and oddly fretful. A winged creature tumbled into their clearing, then immediately took off upon seeing them in a shimmer of yellow scales.

There were plenty of days where Dongyoung was sick of being in his own head. He was finicky and quick to feel and easily frustrated, and he still wasn’t sure he liked himself all that much. He could imagine Yuta looking at his surface thoughts and getting every impression upended. Suddenly, Dongyoung felt like maybe he’d made a mistake. Yuta would hate h—

“No,” Yuta snapped, and Dongyoung had never hear him sound like that except in the orchid fields against their peer. He looked almost angry when Dongyoung clicked back into the moment. “Never,” Yuta said, then took in a deep breath and all the anger melted away. “You have a nice mind. I like it.”

This is not what Dongyoung expected, suddenly embarrassed because wow. Wow, he could never have a negative thought again or Yuta might beat his ass.

Yuta, funnily enough, was the one to roll his eyes. “I can step out whenever you want,” he sighed. “But if you want, I can teach you how to put up nets against me.”

Which is exactly what Yuta did. Dongyoung always imagined brilliant gold networks of thread to keep his silver star away.

* * *

“Do you ever wish I could hear your thoughts?” Dongyoung asked. It was night, and Dongyoung had smuggled himself back to Yuta’s dorm while his roommates were out for a Season Celebration. The light was dim, but Dongyoung could still see the way Yuta snorted and fell back on his bed.

“No. I’m bad at keeping my secrets down,” he said, voice a low murmur. His hair splayed against his pillow in strands darker than empty space.

Maybe if it was during the day, Dongyoung would have felt differently—insulted, worried, stressed—but in the darkness of Yuta’s corner of the dorm, he was doubting himself more than anything. He could feel Yuta’s eyes on him as his next thought took shape, and before it could even form words in his head, Yuta responded softly, “I trust you.”

“Then—”

“You have things you hide from me,” Yuta said, but he said it with care. Dongyoung could feel how obviously he was trying not to hurt him. “It’s not a bad thing.”

Dongyoung wrestled with this, sitting on the center edge of the bed with his hands in his lap. “I can tell you my secrets,” he said, but his he could already feel his heart rate spiking and his chemicals mix a true disaster.

“I don’t need that from you,” Yuta said, hurried. “I don’t need to know everything. It’s your mind, not mine.”

Dongyoung threw up his nets before he let the secret loose before he was ready.

Yuta smiled from where he lay, eyes glimmering in understanding. It was maybe their fifth time in Yuta’s room alone—being enclosed wasn’t their regular priority—and yet it still was no easier. Yuta never acted any differently regardless of their setting, but Dongyoung couldn’t help but think that he, himself, probably did.

“What if I want to tell you?”

The glimmer in Yuta’s eyes sharpened, then softened. “Then I’ll listen. Or look, myself. Whichever you’d prefer.”

Dongyoung let out a shaky breath. “Can I hold your hand?”

Like a computer lagging, Yuta slowed, breath stuttering in his chest. “That’s not…”

“No, that’s not the secret,” Dongyoung laughed, nerves making it weak, then held out his hand.

Yuta blinked at him, then seemingly rebooted. He raised himself onto his elbows, then scooted up against the headboard, sitting up now. It was only then that he took Dongyoung’s hand.

It was the same sensation at first like it had been when Yuta first walked through his mental gates. Soft, cool, careful. And then the summer came. Yuta’s skin was warm in a way that could only be described as touching a sun-soaked rock. It was different and completely unlike physical connection with anyone else.

“You’re nervous,” Yuta said, sounding almost mournful, and it was then that Dongyoung keyed into how fast his heart was thrashing. “Are you going to poison me?” his tone was teasing, now, and Dongyoung grimaced. He knew his hands were sweaty. They almost always were. His skin wasn’t like other people’s. It had to stay moist or he’d keel over in heatstroke.

“I won’t hurt you,” Dongyoung said only because he refused to. That didn’t mean that he might not unintentionally knock Yuta out  _ anyway _ , but he sure as hell wouldn’t poison him. Not Yuta.

“Right,” Yuta said, and smiled brightly. “That would be a shocker if you did.”

Dongyoung smiled at him, then checked one last thing before mentally preparing himself. “You’re not overwhelmed?”

It was one of those times again where Yuta just gazed at him for a handful of seconds before answering. “Not for the same reasons as usual,” he said calmly.

Dongyoung huffed. “I must feel gross.” He knew many people thought his race was disgusting at best.

Yuta’s eyelids fluttered in annoyance and he sighed. “You feel fine. People are full of shit.”

For a moment, Dongyoung was frightened, thinking that his nets had come down prematurely, but no. They were still secure. Yuta just… knew him. Maybe didn’t need to hear every thought all the time to know what he was thinking.

“It’s kind of nice, honestly,” Yuta said, and rubbed the pad of his thumb over Dongyoung’s knuckles. It wiped away some of the shine, but it came back in less than a moment. “Your skin is very cool. No wonder you don’t overheat.”

Dongyoung didn’t know what to do with this compliment, so he let it be before it overtook him and made him overheat from the inside out instead.

Squeezing Yuta’s hand slightly, Dongyoung let his nets down slowly to let the silver back in. He let everything else go, too, and watched Yuta’s eyes go distant.

He’d figured out lately how to do just brief mental blocks, like golden shields, that he could fling up in any moment Yuta caught him off guard. When he smiled too brightly, or said something too kind, or he teased him out of nowhere, or the light just… hit him in the right way and made him shimmer. Like clockwork, Dongyoung’s heart would hiccup in these moments and he’d have to throw up a shield before Yuta figured out he was in love.

Yuta’s breath hitched. “Wh—”

A good majority of Dongyoung’s people had been wiped out by the diseases the interlopers had wrapped up in good intentions, or were otherwise dispersed throughout the galaxy for medical and botanical efforts. Dongyoung had been too young, and his parents had died, and he was truly, mostly alone at Fi-De. Yuta had been the only person to stand up for Dongyoung to date, and by far the person he was closest to now. Not that it was difficult to outstrip anyone else. Dongyoung’s bar was low, and Yuta jumped high.

In a world called home, Yuta, Dongyoung thought now, was probably the most familiar thing there. Dongyoung could cope just fine without his immediate presence at all times, but he looked forward from each patch of being alone to being with him again. To trade stories or questions or nothing at all. Yuta felt like how home used to feel.

Not only that, but he was a royal kick between the legs.

Yuta coughed on a snort too violent and sudden, and as nervous and afraid as Dongyoung’s heart was being, he continued onward.

He’d heard stories most of his life how AI and Spects were deceptively beautiful. They were illusions and manipulative, bent to look how everyone wanted them to look to gain favor and advantage. Cold, they’d been called. A drug, they’d been called. And yet, Dongyoung had never met anyone so warm and so conscientious. He couldn’t… feasibly argue against Yuta being beautiful to him. That’s what he meant by a kick between the legs most of all. Sometimes, he was so attractive it was crippling, and all Dongyoung wanted to do was laugh to keep himself from shaking to pieces.

He’d wondered for months now what it would be like to touch him, to pull him forward and kiss him, to—

Dongyoung stopped wondering.

Yuta’s hand was on his neck, warm and sunny in its silver blue, and he pulled him in, lips immediately slotting with his.

Dongyoung’s heart hiccuped, stuttering in his chest as Yuta’s fingers threaded into Dongyoung’s hair while he kissed his bottom lip like a confession.

There were no nets to put up because Dongyoung couldn’t have formed a single thought if he wanted to.

He didn’t wait for Yuta to pull back and ask if it had been okay, if he’d overstepped his boundaries. The second the moment clicked for him, Dongyoung shifted his whole body closer and parted his lips, cutting back on a sigh of something unreal and uninhibited in his lungs.

Yuta didn’t need to know every nook and cranny of Dongyoung, but he had needed to know this one thing. Dongyoung was pretty damn sure he’d gone and fallen in love.

He was warm even with fabric between Dongyoung’s palms and his chest, giving off an invisible, crackling glow. Dongyoung pressed deeper into the kiss, eyes squeezed closed in gracelessness. Yuta tugged at him until he was in his lap, one hand hesitating at the hem of his shirt, and Dongyoung’s mind flashed with a vivid heat, the thought of Yuta’s hands elsewhere like a brand.

Yuta shuddered and pulled at Dongyoung’s shirt, and it was the only acceptable action to break off the kiss. Except as soon as it was up and over Dongyoung’s head, Yuta had his head tipped back and a breath of a laugh trembled out of his throat.

“I feel woozy,” he said, and then started to laugh for real as Dongyoung underwent a full-body blush.

“Shit,” Dongyoung blurted, pressing a palm to his lips. “Shit, I’m so sorry.” He couldn’t control his chemical secretions well—it was one of the reasons he didn’t like being so emotional. His composition reacted in seconds to his mood to beckon or shun, and it was moments like these he wished it didn’t happen at all.

Yuta wheezed, chuckles wracking his body as his breaths and heartbeat wrung slow through his skin. “You’re a knockout,” he said, and all Dongyoung could do to retort was smack his chest.

“I said I’m sorry,” Dongyoung snipped. Everything was fluttery and strange inside his body, and the way Yuta swallowed with his neck stretched as he tried to regain his senses—

Yuta huffed, then righted himself. “It’s tingly,” Yuta murmured, and then his touch was skating over Dongyoung’s ribs like he hadn’t just had half a dose of anaesthetics. “If we keep going, will I pass out?” he asked, and sounded curious more than anything. “Are you compatible with other races?” His mouth pressed to the skin of Dongyoung’s neck where his heart quivered. “How fast do I have to be to bed you?”

Dongyoung burned. These were things he didn’t know. He squeaked when he felt Yuta’s tongue against his pulse, and he felt like passing out himself as he sucked gently at the fragile skin. “You’re amazing,” Yuta mumbled, and for a moment, Dongyoung thought he was losing him as his lips travelled lower, but then he bit gently at his collar bone. Dongyoung bit down himself on a whisper of a moan.

“A—anaesthetics are when I’m startled. I—”

“What about when you’re turned on?” Yuta’s mouth was so slow traveling over his skin, and mad thoughts were traversing through Dongyoung’s mind like an infinite feedback loop of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yuta was a good listener.

“I don’t know,” Dongyoung said, but they would both know in a single minute more.

It was aphrodisiacs.

The answer was aphrodisiacs.

* * *

He woke up wrapped in Yuta, and discovered a couple of new words for him. Cuddly, clingy. If Dongyoung reached up, he could thread his fingers through his dark hair and feel it slide through his fingers like fine threads of silk. His skin flickered, an accidental invention fading and brightening in a single, sleeping star.

When he kissed his forehead, summer was there and pressed up against his skin. Under rough covers and warm limbs and a confession of reciprocated love right before unconsciousness.

Somewhere in the room, Yuta’s roommates had returned and were buried in their lumpy duvets and hangover dreams.

Dongyoung didn’t care, and only worked to slot himself more perfectly against Yuta and think, sleepily, that he loved him over and over again.

Because maybe Yuta would hear him.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic had the massive potential to be something greater—as have many of my birthday gifts so far. This one was so, so enticing, though, because these two could really fuck some things up if it so possessed them. Maybe someday I'll write the multi-chaptered fic they deserve.
> 
> Miss rainingover, I hope you enjoyed ♡ and I hope this was worth the wait!
> 
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/speckledsolana)   
>  [curiouscat](https://t.co/zW26zmaxzw?amp=1)   
> 


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